The Big City Starbucks experience is far different from the Suburban Starbucks encounter. Perhaps it's because this Starbucks is on campus, but I've been to other center city coffee establishments, and have encountered much the same thing at all of them. Suburban Starbucks are library quiet, with earnest people doing business while hunched over their laptop computers or couples tête-à -tête over their lattes, speaking in quiet undertones. Occasionally the quiet is broken by the arrival of a young mother with toddlers, but they seldom stay long and the remaining patrons heave a collective sigh of relief when mom and kids make their escape with chocolate chip cookies and an extra strong cappuccino in tow.
Starbucks in the city is a meeting place. Students meet with classmates. Teachers hold office hours in nooks and corners. Earnest T.A.'s hunch over stacks of papers, red pen in hand, dealing doom, death and destruction to the latest undergraduate chemistry lab write ups while talking on their cell phones in languages I neither recognize nor understand. The feeling is that of an airport terminal or public park, with people coming and going in a noisy Brownian motion of quiet cacophony. Oddly enough, I have less of a feeling of belonging here in this multinational masala than I do in the world of carefully observed personal space. I suspect that says less of me than more.